A Long Way Down

by Randall Silvis

  “College is overrated,” she told him. “Binge drinking, sex parties, it gets tedious after a while.”

  He smiled. “I’m barely literate.”

  “You’re more literate than ninety-eight percent of the people I know.”

  He blew out a slow breath. “It’s intimidating. It will be like working two cases at the same time. Three cases counting the one from 1988.”

  “We can read to each other at night. We’ll pick out the pieces you like best. It could be fun. Could maybe even wash the taste of a bad day out of our mouths, so to speak.”

  “Tom wasn’t all happiness and light,” he told her.

  “Sounds like somebody else I know. Which is probably why Rosemary picked you.”

  He thought for a few moments. “There are bad days coming,” he told her. “Four boxes full on the dining room table.”

  She patted his thigh. “You’re preaching to the choir, babe.”

  Fourteen

  When Jayme awoke that night and found the other half of the bed empty, then looked at the little clock, 3:21, at first she thought she was still in her grandmother’s house in Kentucky, and wondered why the night smelled differently, why the perfume of the summersweet bushes was undetectable, replaced by a vague staleness of air. Then she remembered: Ryan’s house.

  If he had gotten up to work, to get an early start on the files the sheriff had given them, she should smell coffee, but didn’t. The bedroom door stood halfway open, with no light beyond. He lives in such darkness, she thought. She slid out of bed, picked up the sherpa blanket she had dropped at the foot of the bed five hours earlier, wrapped it around her shoulders, and went into the hallway.

  The house was silent. In the living room, where she had hoped to find him asleep on his recliner, the only sign of life was the blue readout on the cable box: 3:23. The kitchen, too, was empty and dark, illuminated only by another digital readout, this one on the range and more greenish than blue. She stood there with head cocked, not even aware that she was staring at the clock until it clicked and changed: 3:24.

  Then she felt the soft, warm breeze on her legs. The kitchen door stood open, screen door closed and colored black with darkness.

  He was sitting out there on the edge of the low porch, hunched over, elbows on his thighs. She pushed the screen door open softly, let it softly close, crossed to sit beside him. Slipped a hand around his arm. “What’s going on in that head of yours?” she asked.

  “Nada y nada, bella.”

  “Liar,” she said, and laid her head against his shoulder.

  A couple of minutes passed before he spoke. “I can’t shake the feeling that maybe this is a mistake.”

  “What is, babe?”

  “Coming back to all this. Especially that business in Youngstown.”

  “So we’re having second thoughts?”

  “Tenth and twelfth thoughts.”

  “Are you sure it’s about the homicides? Not that box of stuff from Tom? Or maybe it’s about Laraine?”

  He shrugged. Watched the stars awhile. “There were more stars in Kentucky,” he said.

  She turned her head against him, kissed his shoulder through the T-shirt.

  He lowered his gaze. Studied the darkness. In the distance there was a screeching sound, a speeding car taking a turn too fast. Then nothing but a kind of high-altitude rumble.

  He said, “All those years with nothing like this, you know?”

  “Nothing like what?”

  “It was all just so routine. Car wrecks, drunken husbands, hour after hour with a radar gun. Busting a drug dealer here and there. But nothing like this. Three high-profile homicide cases in a row—bam bam bam. Why now?”

  “Maybe the universe was waiting until you were ready for them.”

  “I’m not ready, that’s the thing. Maybe it was waiting for you.”

  “Waiting for the team.”

  “That day at the spa?” he said. “I almost suggested that we not come back. Just turn ourselves around and drive as far away as we could. I had finally gotten used to not being armed everywhere I went. At first I felt off-balance, was always feeling for it, then surprised when the feeling wasn’t there.”

  “I know,” she said. “Me too.”

  He chewed his bottom lip.

  “If we did just take off and go somewhere,” she said, “where would we go?”

  He thought about it, envisioned a map of the United States, a red line moving straight across it, then suddenly veering left. “Mexico maybe. Baja. The Sea of Cortez. I have visions of us all suntanned and salty, barefoot on the beach with our surf rods and wide-brimmed hats.”

  “I didn’t know you like surf fishing.”

  “Never tried it. Looks relaxing, though.”

  “We can pack up and leave in the morning,” she told him, then waited a long three minutes for a reply.

  He did not want to tell her that he was afraid. That when they had thumbed through the case files before going to bed, a chill of fear had possessed him. She would laugh, say you aren’t afraid of anything. But that was not true. Some dark assignation lay ahead of him. He could smell it in the air, a vague but distinctly slaughterhouse reek. And he feared it. Did not know the nature of that assignation, only knew that what waited for him was more powerful than he was, and would find him no matter what he decided to do.

  “Thing is, I hate backing out of something I agreed to,” he told her, and tried for a lighter tone. “Plus I wouldn’t want Fascetti thinking he scared us away.”

  “I keep thinking about the girl. Samantha Lewis. So young and beautiful. Her picture reminds me of my friend MaryKyle, the one who died when I was in high school. I told you about her, right?”

  “Mmm-hmm.”

  “What was done to Samantha…and to the men too, all of them… If it were me that happened to, I’d want somebody willing to go to the mat for me. Wouldn’t you?”

  “There’s going to be more,” he told her. “More violence of some kind. I can feel it in my bones.”

  “Not if we stop him, there won’t.”

  He said, “How much of this baggage can we carry?”

  She took in a slow breath. Released it just as slowly. “We can do whatever you want,” she told him. “Wherever you want. What would make you happy?”

  “Something more…I don’t know. Productive. Meaningful.”

  She wasn’t going to argue with him. Better to let him think his own thoughts. He would bring himself around to a decision eventually. Besides, it was nice out here with him and the stars. Everything so hushed and still.

  “When I was a kid,” he told her, “the only thing I really wanted was to understand.”

  She waited. When it seemed he had no intention of continuing, she asked, “Understand what?”

  “Why life is so ugly. People so cruel to each other. Every chance I got I’d head for the woods in one of the parks, or over to the railroad tracks or down along the river. Figured if I just kept walking, sooner or later I would see or hear something. Some explanation, you know? I felt like I should know it already…used to know it. Just needed to find it again. Thing is, and I never realized this until now, but I never looked for that explanation from people. Only by getting as far away from people as I could.”

  She said, “You’re still looking for that explanation, aren’t you?”

  “And beginning to think I’ve been looking in the wrong direction all this time.”

  “You mean you should be looking to get it from people?”

  He shook his head side to side, then surprised her with what he said next. “The funny thing about those dreams I had in the mountains,” he told her, and paused again before he continued. “They felt more real… No, that’s not right. I felt more real. More real than I do right now.”

  “I’m not sure I understand what you m
ean.”

  “I don’t know how to express it.”

  She waited.

  “It felt like it was life at a deeper level,” he told her. “More meaningful than this one. But in a way I can’t quite get a handle on.”

  She smiled despite the dampness in her eyes. He hadn’t meant to offend her or to diminish the importance their relationship. He would never do that.

  He made a kind of chuckling sound, a tiny grunt deep in his chest. Then said, “You know I never had anybody I could talk to the way I can with you.”

  “Not even Ben or one of your other buddies? Not even a girlfriend?”

  “I didn’t really have friends. Just people I knew.”

  “Not even your mother?”

  “My mother…lived on the surface of things. Life was too slippery for her. Never could keep her footing. It was all I could do just to hold her upright.”

  She searched for her own words then, but soon told herself, Be still, just listen.

  “Sorry,” he said, and smiled to make light of himself. “I don’t mean to be so metaphorical. My night sickness, I guess.”

  “You must have been so lonely as a boy. All alone against the world.”

  “I guess I never admitted that to myself. Wouldn’t let myself admit it.”

  “You’re not still lonely, are you?”

  He slipped his arm around her shoulders. Pulled her close. “It’s one thing to be alone and lonely,” he told her. “And a whole other thing to be lonely with you.”

  She understood. Remembered the gawky, gangly, lonely girl she used to be. Knew exactly what he meant. And let her silent tears soak into his shirt.

  * * *

  Gawky. Gangly. Jayme hated those words and all of their synonyms. From fourth grade all through high school, those words had defined her. She heard them not only from teachers and classmates but also from her own family. Only her oldest brother, Galen, and her friend MaryKyle refrained from using those words. She never doubted that her family loved her, never doubted that she was bright, a quick learner, but when you are raw and unformed, even love is not enough, and intelligence runs a distant second to pretty.

  In college, when finally the boys were taller than her and had no knowledge of her as an awkward child, they said she was beautiful, she was elegant, she took their breath away. She smiled at the compliments but never believed them. Only the mirror told the truth. The child you were never leaves the mirror.

  That didn’t stop her from trying to erase the child. Too many surrogates for Galen. Too many for MK. Their professions of love left her empty. Only later, years later, did she understand why. To truly love her was to love the gangly child that lived in her. To see that child, and to adore her as she was.

  She would always remember the moment she met Ryan DeMarco. Her first day with Troop D. He had returned to the barracks late that afternoon, long after everybody else had been introduced to her. She had approached him as he came down the hall with his eyes lowered, held out her hand, said, “Hi. I’m Jayme.”

  When he looked up and their eyes met, the feeling was immediate. Just like every cliché in every love song ever written. Electricity when their hands touched. A heavy thump deep in her chest. She recognized herself in him and knew that he had recognized himself in her.

  “Welcome,” he’d said, then looked away, strode away without another word. And every day thereafter, she found herself trying to get close to him. She knew he was still in mourning, estranged from his wife, their only child long dead, but she also knew he felt the pull between them too, knew that was why he always looked at her with hooded eyes, always kept their conversations brief. But she was patient. And finally made her way into his bed. Only to have him pull from her even harder. To suppress every feeling in himself that was healing and good.

  Until finally, a mere ten months ago, he had mustered the strength to break from his wife. And turned to who in his emptiness? To Jayme. Where he had always belonged.

  Because she knew herself, she knew him. They were two halves of the same whole. The seam that joined them was not smooth, however. His childhood had been far more damaging than hers, had left his edges ragged and torn. His years as a soldier carved other scars, so that the seam between them was tentative in places, the whole always in danger of tearing apart.

  So she could never let that happen. To do so would be to let the gawky, homely, lonely child claim the mirror again. She would always be there in the background, and Jayme was okay with that now, always gave her a smile and a nod, but the foreground belonged to the other Jayme, and that one was determined to rearrange DeMarco’s mirror too, to guide that dark and frightened and angry little boy deep into the background where he belonged.

  Fifteen

  It was past noon before they finished going through the four boxes of information. Five hours of sifting through Fascetti and Olcott’s reports, the older files pertaining to Brogan and Talarico, the coroner’s reports, newspaper clippings and photographs. Both DeMarco and Jayme had copied essential information into their notebooks: names, ages, dates of birth, home addresses, places of employment, times and dates of death, places and times where the bodies or first parts of the bodies were discovered. The cause of death was the same in the three most recent cases: asphyxia.

  Talarico and Brogan, on the other hand, were probably both alive when they were butchered in the summer of 1988. Both were killed in the woods alongside the twelfth fairway of the Fonderlac Country Club south of Youngstown, their body parts then scattered across the fairway and green, where the first foursome of the morning discovered them beneath a cloud of raucous crows.

  Learning such intimate details of the victims’ last minutes, and layering this information atop the pre- and postmortem photos, weighed heavily on both Jayme and DeMarco. The dining room felt small, the padded chairs no longer comfortable. The only windows faced north, and though the small front yard lay in full sunlight, the room felt dim yet too warm.

  Jayme pushed herself away from the dining room table and stood. “You want another cup?”

  “God no,” DeMarco said. “I feel like an acid volcano ready to blow.”

  Her nose crinkled, and the corner of her mouth twitched in a wince. “That’s a pretty picture.”

  “Sorry,” he said.

  “So now what?”

  “Food.”

  “I’m not eating anything that’s been in your refrigerator for the past three weeks.”

  “I was thinking croissant sandwiches at Burger King.”

  She glanced at the clock on the range. “They stopped serving breakfast two hours ago.”

  “I feel like I need eggs. Something soft and bland.”

  “Grab your notes,” she told him as she picked up her own notebook. “We’ll swing by Eat’n Park, then find an empty gazebo somewhere. Wear your walking shoes.”

  He raised both hands to the ceiling, tried to stretch the kinks out of his back. “Brilliant,” he said.

  Sixteen

  They had avoided discussing the case while eating their egg sandwiches and fruit-and-yogurt bowls at a shelter in Memorial Park. Instead they reread their notes, watched a few joggers, watched people walking their dogs, watched the dogs pooping in the grass. DeMarco thought he might like to have a dog. He’d had a puppy as a boy, but only for a day, until his father came home and found it and silenced its whimpering for good.

  Now they were walking. The asphalt path they followed made a wide loop around the park, a little over a half mile in length. They were finishing the first lap when DeMarco started the conversation.

  “Three victims. Three different neighborhoods. Three different ages. Two different sexes. Three different lifestyles. No friends or known acquaintances in common.”

  Jayme read from a pocket notebook with a yellow cover. “Victims one and three, Brenner and Hufford, both decapitated and emascu
lated. That matches both Brogan and Talarico. All four were stripped naked except for their socks. That matches victim two from the Cleveland murders.”

  DeMarco said, “I thought we were leaving Cleveland out of this.”

  “I don’t know if we can. Costa appears to have been following the Cleveland model when he killed Talarico and Brogan.”

  “If we accept that it was Costa.”

  “Correct,” she said. “For the sake of argument. He then followed the same pattern for Hufford and Brenner.”

  “But not for victim #2, Samantha Lewis.”

  “Right,” Jayme said. “She’s the anomaly. She was almost decapitated, but not quite. Fully dressed. Body wholly intact. That doesn’t match any of the other victims.”

  “Something spooked him when he was working on her.”

  “Or he just had a hard time cutting up a girl. She’s his only female.”

  “So he went back to a male for number three.”

  “So in every case except Samantha’s,” Jayme said, “the killer has got to be covered in blood, no matter how sharp the blade is supposed to have been. How does he get away without anybody seeing him? In 1988, I can understand. But today? With all the security cameras and smartphones around?”

  “However he did it, all five victims were abducted. That’s not like Cleveland either. The Torso victims were probably killed where they were first encountered, in alleys and empty lots and so forth. But the five most recent victims were abducted and killed somewhere else. Whether they went willingly or by gunpoint, stun gun, or whatever, they were subdued, taken somewhere private, killed and dismembered.”

  “Except that Hufford and Brenner were all taped up and asphyxiated before dismemberment. But no tape residue on Lewis. Plastic bag. The records don’t say anything about tape residue on Brogan and Talarico either.”

  “Plus they were bled out. Still alive during the cutting.”

  “He took it easier on the three new ones,” DeMarco said. “Because he’s older now? More mellow? Lost his taste for torture?”